autumn will pile old gold on your grave
by The Lady Avaritia
Summary: -and winter winds will push us to embrace- If you were to ask me how my older brother died, I would say to you "Slowly."


If you were to ask me how my older brother died, I would have to say to you, "Slowly."

The summer of my eighth year my older cousin Shisui killed himself in the Nakano river, and left a note. My brother remained as stoic as usual, but at night I could hear him cry in his bedroom. Shisui was his closest friend. I cried too, of course, perhaps more than was appropriate for the Uchiha heir.

Soon after that, perhaps a week, or two weeks, I lost my entire family, sans one. My brother, who was on a mission at the time our family was murdered, survived, and so did I. I woke up in the hospital, and I could still feel the warm thick blood of Mother on my childish hands, and Itachi's head was bowed and he was crying softly. He'd returned to Konoha early in the morning, only to be told that he could find his brother in the hospital, and his clan in the morgue.

Looking back on this most horrific part of my childhood, I can never remember the night of the massacre, except in flashes in my nightmares. I see red eyes, when I dream of it. Red eyes and pretty hands and thin lips twisted in a line, and the slender silhouette of someone who looks too much like my brother.

We moved out of the compound to a large apartment in one of the shinier village districts, close to the academy. My brother said to me "You can skip a year if you want to," and I told him "No."

If Itachi had been indulgent before, now he was downright spoiling me. He took time off to be with me, he played with me, he helped me with homework. When I finished my year at the academy top of my class he took a month off work and took me abroad. We went sight seeing, and to the beach. We didn't take another holiday together for the longest time.

Brother was often sad. Sometimes, he froze up and just stood in one place for the longest time. Sometimes he cried, without knowing it. He would be talking to me, correcting my stance, and tears would stream from his eyes as he smiled. I feared for my brother. I feared my brother. A part of me kept screaming that Itachi was no longer the safe haven he had once been, but I ignored it, because Niisan was all I had left.

All the same, living with him had become a trap I couldn't get out of. The subtle sense of imminent danger I felt in his presence wouldn't leave me alone. My anxiety at the time sometimes kept me bedridden, when I was dizzy and nauseous with fear I couldn't explain. I said the worst things to him sometimes, in my childish cruelty, I threw stuff at him, and he never once even tried to dodge. I made him cry more than I am willing to admit.

He left for a month once, on a mission he never explained, and that's when I knew he'd chosen to rejoin ANBU, though he never spoke of it. His absence became longer. The oppressive silences and empty dark spaces of the apartment felt safer when he wasn't there. He left me food neatly packed, and money, and he talked to the Haruno's to please check on me when he was gone. He left me money, always in the same place, under the sugar bowl on the counter top and ramen coupons in case the pre-prepared food ran out. I gave the ramen coupons to Naruto.

The longer Itachi was absent, the more unbearable it became when he returned, exhausted, covered in bruises, with rings under his eyes and a painful smile on his face. He would wrap his arms around me, and holds me for the longest time so tight I felt my ribs would crack.

If my brother had any friends in the ANBU and among the jonin he worked with, he kept those friendships to himself. He was a painfully private person. No one came to visit us. If he went out with them for drinks, I never knew. He tossed names occasionally in conversation, but they meant nothing to me. For years and years his closest and only friend had been Shisui-niichan, who'd drowned himself in the river with a smile on his lips.

When he was in Konoha, Itachi took me to school and without fail picked me up after. He took me to dinner to various establishments and he tucked me in. He could tell I was afraid of him, and I could tell that more often than not he cried himself to sleep at night, and downed more aspirins and melatonin pills than was good for him.

I graduated the academy when I was thirteen. For the first time in hearly a year I had a huge fight with my brother. He was angry with me, desperate, I think, to change my mind to become a ninja. I accused him of threatening Iruka to fail me before. His face blanched, he pressed his lips and stormed out and I knew it was true. I yelled after him and called him a liar and a traitor. I locked myself in my room and cried tears of anger and fury, and beat my fists bloody against the walls.  
The apartment was empty the following morning, the fridge packed with food, and a note that he would be gone for the next three months on a mission in Kumo. His absences had never been this long. His notes - never this snide. "Since you are a genin now, I trust you will be able to care for yourself." I had hurt him.

I was still angry, and determined to remain so. I stormed to the academy to find out who my teammates would be. Iruka sensei was sporting a black eye and a kunai scratch on his cheek. He looked a little sick as he said my name. I wondered if Itachi had hurt him for letting me pass this year. I felt nausea rising up in my stomach. I was in the same team as Naruto and Sakura. Naruto had, by some miracle passed the exam yesterday. None of us had expected him to walk out of the room with a hitai-ate, but miracles clearly did happen. I knew Sakura, because Itachi had asked her mother ot check on me in his absences, and I didn't harbor a particular dislike for her. She was academically excellent and she was pleasant to talk to, soft-spoken and unobtrusive, unlike my other fangirls. I could tolerate her.

Our sensei was late to our first team meeting. He would be late for every team meeting to follow, but I did not know that yet. His name was Hatake Kakashi, and all I knew about him was that my father had once gone on a tangent and spewed venom about him for two hours straight. Itachi had mentioned him in passing once or twice, so he was probably ANBU. He looked at me for the longest time.

I passed the bell test. I came home to the dark empty apartment and celebrated to myself with Itachi's dull cooking. In a moment of pettiness once I had told him that he would never cook like mom. He dropped the plate he was holding. Later that same night he stood in front of the kitchen sink and systematically smashed the whole set of plates, and for the next month we lived on take out until I asked him in a small shameful voice to cook for me again.

I was still feeling spiteful, pumped up with anger from our fight, but he had ran away on the first mission they thought to give him. That made me even angrier, I was itching for confrontation. Sparring with my new teammates helped a lot in the anger department. The D-rank missions were boring and frustrating like jack-shit else, but at least they gave me something to do. I noticed that this time Haruno-san did not come to check on me. Maybe Itachi had been in such a hurry to leave me behind that he did not think to ask her. Or maybe I had made him so angry it was his own way of showing it.

A month passed since he left. I landed my first C-rank mission with my team, but I had no one to celebrate it with. I pulled out the stack of ramen coupons Itachi had left for me, and took Naruto and Sakura and even Kakashi sensei to Ichiraku's, my treat. We stayed out late. I didn't want to come home to the empty apartment.

I couldn't sleep that night. I poked my head in his room. Maybe he'd left a bottle of melatonin pills laying around. Everything was neat and perfectly organized. Nothing out of order. The bed was made. He had two photos on his nightstand. One of our parents, and one of Shisui. The Shisui one was face down. A thin layer of dust covered everything. His navy blue bedspread didn't have a single crease on it. There was a vase of dry flowers on the windowsill. I felt, for the first time since I was a toddler, the desire to snoop around in his private places. I had about three hours to do so, and I felt childish excitement at the thought. In his dresser were his neatly ironed and folded clothes, a spare hitai-ate, and his weapons arsenal, or, what he hadn't taken with him that was left from it. He had a wooden box with five layers that was full of 50ml bottles of poison essences. I didn't want to know if he used them ot make poisons or antidotes. He kept his official fancier clothes in big white boxes on the top shelves – his kimonos, heavy embroided silk and brocade were there. He wore them only on festivals.

I found a jewelry box that was full of family heirlooms and a few of mother's favorite hairpins and bracelets. Those were the things he hadn't locked up in the safe under the Uchiha meeting place. His desk was as organized as everything else. The main drawers were locked. He probably kept confidential mission papers there, I didn't care about his paperwork. In the drawers of the two nightstands, I found other things. He had his own first air kit, and the melatonin pills I was looking for in the first place, and knives too. And Shisui's suicide note. I imagined him late at night, unable to sleep, rereading it over and over again. I put it back. I didn't feel like snooping anymore. I resolved to wipe the whole room down when I came back from my mission. Of the dust and of my fingerprints. I felt shame of what I had done.

When I came back from my first successful B-rank mission, with my Sharingan awakened and the weight of my considerable payment in my pocket, the apartment was still dusty and empty, and Itachi-still gone. I cleaned the whole place up, moved some things, threw away everything in the fridge, and restocked on groceries. I ate take out sushi alone on the balcony, looking down on the people that passed beneath me. Some of the plants had died, because there was no one to water them. I threw them away, pots and all, and put a mental note to pass by the Yamanaka flower shop and replace them. Itachi had tried to take Mother's garden with us in the move. I did not want him to scold me first thing upon his return.

A two moth mark passed. The Chuunin exams approached. I wondered if he'd make it on time, to cheer for me, or try to convince me to wait another year before taking them. I missed him, even though I hated to admit it. I wanted him to come back already. I was tired of ramen and take out and the three dishes I knew how to cook, I was tired of the empty apartment, and the closed door to his bedroom, I was tired of nightmares, where HE was the one who slaughtered our family, I wanted him to just come back already, and I was ready to apologize for all the things I had said.

It became clear to me that he would not return on time to see me take the Chuunin exams. I signed up on my own. I would have liked to talk to him first, to receive some reassurance, and his painful carved in smile. I slept in his bed the night before the written exam and fancied that I could smell him on the pillows. It was an uneasy sleep. I tossed and turned in bed, got tangled in the sheets… Halfway through my usual nightmare, in which Niisan loomed over mother and father's dead bodies with a bloodied katana I was woken by loud banging on the door. I threw a robe on and I rushed to open, a kunai in my hand, and my eyes flaming red like ambers.

"Who is it?"

I did not take the Chuunin exam on the following morning. I did not take the Chuunin exam at all. And if you were to ask me how my older brother died, I would say to you "Slowly."

I sat in the waiting area of the hospital for long hours that night, listening to my brother scream and trash in the operation room. The head of T&I, Ibiki Morino refused to allow any painkillers until my brother confessed to what extent he'd compromised confidential Konoha information. Itachi denied having betrayed anything, in between pleas for mercy, and sharp wailing. I wanted to put my hands over my ears, but I didn't. if he could bear it, I could listen to him. I knew he'd never betray Konoha. Anything but that. Morino stormed out, an angry scarred man, that I, to this day, hate for making my beautiful brother suffer even more.

I was allowed to see him late in the morning, in his private room in the ICU. His eyes were covered in thick white bandages. Machines beeped around him, and his hands were limp on the covers, put in heavy white casts to keep him from jarring the broken bones. A part of me wanted ot run away, to run out NOW. Never before had I been more aware that I may lose the last family I had left, the brother I loved, hated and feared all the same, the brother who was everything to me. The last conversation we'd had was a fight. I had pushed him to leave on a mission, and he'd been distracted because of me, and he'd ended up captured and it was all my fault that he was this way.

They had plucked his eyes out. A good pair of Sharingan eyes to sell on the black market. But they had done that after… the other things. I didn't want to know. They told me anyway. When Itachi woke up, he was in a frenzy of pain and panic. I had to talk him through it. I had to reassure him, and explain his blindness to him. Then I held him when he cried, salty tears slipping under the bandages, causing him only more pain.

He was in the hospital for six months in total. In that time, I hired contractors, and supervised the repair work on our old house in the Uchiha district. Then I packed our apartment, sold it, and moved everything back in. I kept in touch with Sakura and Naruto, in between running around the village from one emergency work to another. They kept me sane, largely. Because of me they hadn't been able to take the exam, but they, thankfully, held no grudge for it. Instead, they offered me help, and help was needed and appreciated.

Until then, it had never occurred to me how lucky I was to be as materially wealthy as I was, but in that moment the bottomless pit that was the Uchiha treasury came very handy. I made calculations and figured things out, and it became blatantly clear to me that both me and Itachi could live out the rest of our lives in excessive mind-numbing luxury without neither of us having to do so much as lift a finger, and there would still be piles of money left to bequeath to any heirs we might have. I lit incense at the altar of my ancestors and thanked their hindsight and well-kept books, and their bone-dry materialism for making it possible for me to cover every expense that would be required to bring Itachi to health and take proper care of him from now on.

When Itachi was released from the hospital, he looked like a ghost to me. His skin was thin and yellowish and almost transparent, revealing weak violet veins under it. His beautiful silky hair had been hacked off mercilessly and it had thinned out too. There were long jagged scars running over his face, where they had cut to carve his eyes out. His lids were sunken over the empty sockets. He was as weak and brittle as an old man. His thin fingers, crooked after having been broken many times in many places, clutched his cane, until his swollen rheumatic knuckles turned white. I supported his meager weight as I walked him home. He had become thin and sharp, his bones outlined beneath fragile skin. It was painful to look at him, my lovely skeletal brother.

His face twisted when the sunlight hit his skin.

"Sasuke," he says softly.  
"Yes, Niisan?"  
"Get me away from all these people," he pleads softly, shaking. I did as he asked.  
"This… isn't the way to the apartment?" Itachi says a bit uncertainly.  
"No. It isn't. We're moving back home." I did't look at Itachi's face as I said it, because I doesn't want to see.

I'd redone the house, and Mother's room is now Itachi's room, because it's on the first floor, adjoins to a bathroom and opens to the inner garden, where fresh herbs and strong scented flowers have just been planted a few days ago. I settled Itachi on the large soft bed, with a special orthopedic mattress for his injured back. I'd arranged the room so there's a lot of space to move, and the furniture is up against the walls. I'd gotten Itachi audiobooks, and books in braille, which he was still a little uncertain with reading. I'd removed everything sharp from places where it could be reached and taken. The medicine and heavy duty painkillers were in the kitchen in one of the higher cabinets, locked. From now on, I would be taking fulltime care of my brother, until I deemed it safe to leave him alone.

Itachi was surprisingly easy to care for. He waned very little of me. He liked being warm, and he liked sleeping in, and on his very good days he liked to sit in the garden and listen to the birds. He absolutely refused to leave the house, or meet with anyone. I indulged him on that account. I didn't really want anyone to see him in his weakness.

Our routine became mundane. My days revolved around him. I was no longer a Konoha genin, I had given up on that when I accepted the responsibility of caring for my brother. In the morning I woke up with the rising sun to make him tea and crush his pills in it. I cooked him breakfast. I woke him up with a kiss and while he ate I laid out clothes for him. Now that he didn't have to do much of anything he had given up on practical clothing, so it was all exquisite beautiful formal kimonos that took two hours to get into. I helped him dress, and I kissed the scars left on his skin. He always looked beautifuly, drowning in silk. I brushed his hair and played with it, which made him purr like a cat. I read out loud to him, or helped him in the garden. He liked to listen to the noises of the garden. He liked to read too. Sometimes he kept me company in the kitchen when I made lunch. My cooking sucked donkey balls, but he never once complained. He always polished his plate and took his medicine without as much as pulling a face. He napped for long hours in the afternoon, which meant I could get some rest too. Our days were like that. Boring, maybe, but I liked it. I bought him jewelry and more and more beautiful clothing. I wanted him to have pretty things. I weaved flower crowns and put them on his head and kissed his cheeks and called him lovely. His hair grew out eventually. He kept it long for me, because I liked it.

It was nice like that, just me, niisan and all the things we didn't say to each other, living in the ghost infested home of our childhood, where our entire family was murdered. Winter rolled around, and Itachi stopped going out of his room. I dragged a heater in there and blasted it as high as it could go. I spent most of winter's days sitting with Itachi on the bed, covered in blankets, drinking hot chocolate and reading to him, and describing the scenery outside in as much detail as I could manage. I was thirteen.

February rolled around with furies and winds that rattled the windows, and I dragged a second heater to Itachi's room. He got sick around the middle of the month, a high fever rocketing, and painful wet coughs puncturing his speech. This was the end of the beginning. By March it was a full blown pneumonia infection, and he was hospitalized. He came home the beginning of April, his immune system severely weakened. He got sick on and off, until there was no point to move him to the hospital anymore, we just got medical equipment in the house. We celebrated my birthday quietly on the porch, when he was well-enough to go out. He'd written me a gift. He'd probably been writing it for a long time. I kissed his cheeks and thanked him profusely for the effort, because it was a novel length work. Then I helped him back to bed, and cleaned up the plates, and put his work in my room, to read safely in the free time I got.

I did not get much free time. Itachi was sick again. Things were bad, when he threw up black blood all over my hands as I tried to raise him from the bed to keep him from choking on his tongue as he tried to cough his infected lungs out. I rushed him to the hospital again. I waited in the now familiar area, pacing the grey floor, inhaling the smell of bleach. I had just turned fourteen, and I could hear the hushed rushed voices of doctors and nurses that were cutting my brother up.

He didn't get any better. I spent my days and nights in the cramped space of his hospital room describing the world to him, as summer rolled into autumn. I begged him to hold on and wait until the first snow. They drained liquid from his lungs twice a day, and he developed a tolerance to even their strongest painkillers. He became impatient, and his moods swung faster than an enemy's kunai. He said hateful terrible things and brought up old fights from the past. He made me cry, but all the same I held his wrinkled withered old-young hand and kissed his swollen red knuckles. He passed away in the middle of October, but there was no snow. Only angry winds blowing.

I attended his funeral alone, and I put him in the family tomb in the spot right next to Shisui's coffin, with the suicide note pressed to his palm. I sat on the cold floor and read to him the last chapter of the book we had been finishing. It was dark when I walked home, it was snowing. I buried my face in the crimson folds of his scarf, that still smelled faintly like his hair.

I got drunk for the first time in my life on that night. I found Naruto in a jonin bar and made him buy me drink after drink. "My brother died," I told him We hadn't spoken in over a year. He dragged me home and put me in bed. In the morning Sakura was in my kitchen making breakfast. I was half-angry, but she slapped me and hugged me. She had just returned from a mission when Naruto found her and dragged her to my place.

I spent the next few months training ferociously. By the time I turned fifteen I was a Chuunin. I had moved back to an apartment in the village, significantly smaller and more cramped. Less homey without Itachi's flowers on the balcony. I cried a lot at night. I still had the nightmares, the same I'd had since I was eight, where Itachi stood over our dead parents with a bloody katana, his eyes a bright hellish red. Now there was another element added to them – now, he reached out for me to pull me against his armored chest, and started rotting, and dragged me down, down, down…

The last thing Itachi had written for me I kept hidden, and I told myself I'd eventually get around to reading it. I made Jonin in June the next year. Naruto and Sakura took me out drinking, and I got shitfaced and cried a lot, I think, and they took me to bed, and I cried the whole time like a big baby "I miss him, I miss him so much, he'd hate me now, he never wanted me to be a ninja, I miss him, we fought before he left, it's my fault he died."

When I said I needed some space and some time, they let me be. I celebrated my birthday alone with Itachi's last gift to me. I didn't want to read it. I wanted to preserve it. I opened it all the same. The paper was soft, white and smooth, the ink was black, and his handwriting – messy. He had written it despite his blindness, trusting only in what his body had memorized thanks to the Sharingan that had been taken from him. I read.

_Sasuke,_

_This I wrote for you and this is my apology. You're sleeping now, and I can hear your breathing. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for many things. I'm sorry for always rebuffing your attempts to play when we were young, I'm sorry for poking your forehead, I'm sorry you had to hear father yell at me all the time, I'm sorry you saw that one time when he hit me, and I'm sorry you found out about the others, I am sorry that I hid in you room late at night, and hugged you so tight your little body bruised, I'm sorry I ignored you, and went fishing with Shisui without taking you with us, I'm sorry I wasn't present at your first day of school, I'm sorry I put my hands around Shisui's throat and pushed him under the water, and wrote a note in his script and I'm sorry you tired to comfort me with kisses when I cried because I killed a beautiful boy, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you have to find out this way that I am bad, I'm sorry for vomiting blood and not telling you, I'm sorry I cut mother and father up like a fruit salad, and I'm sorry I made you forget that you saw me do it, I'm sorry you had to see, I'm sorry you lost uncle and aunt, I'm sorry you lost your puppy and our little cousin who just turned one, I am sorry.  
I'm sorry you have nightmares because of my botched attempt to make you forget, I'm sorry you wake up in the middle of the night, I'm sorry I made you fear me, I'm sorry that I'm gone all the time, I'm sorry for my secrets, I'm sorry, Sasuke, I'm sorry…_

And it went on like that. Page after page, where sometimes the ink was smudged with tears. _I'm sorry I didn't learn to cook like mom, I'm sorry I yelled at you, I'm sorry…_

If you were to ask me how my older brother died, I would have to say to you, "With many regrets."


End file.
